Alfred 2 Workflow to Search DuckDuckGo by Way of Google Suggest

Here’s a quickie workflow for Alfred 2. David Ferguson, a nerd who works on Alfred, has been building some excellent extensions for the launcher/so-much-more app. His Google Suggest workflow caught my eye, only I don’t particularly like using Google for my Web searches anymore. Luckily it’s easy enough to modify workflows in Alfred 2.

Google’s suggestions are a great feature. I use them all the time in Safari1 even though I’ve set the default search engine for the location bar to DuckDuckGo. I like DuckDuckGo’s commitment to privacy and the simplicity of their bang (!) searches. If I want to search on Google, I just type my string and add “!g” to do so. But they don’t offer a suggestion feature. That’s where David’s workflow (and my modification) comes in. (Download it here.)See update below.

I set the shortcut in Alfred to “s” for “search.” Launch Alfred,2 type “s” and then the start of a search string. Google suggestions will come up, selecting any of them and hitting Enter will take me to DuckDuckGo results. Selecting a result and hitting tab will put the cursor after the selected phrase, allowing me to add whatever bang I please, like !imdb or !a for Amazon.

I’m happy I got an Alfred Power Pack, which unleashes the power of workflows. I’m excited to see what else this little app can do.

Updated May 8, 2014: Changed plugin to support the new (and if you ask me, superior) DuckDuckGo Next. More info here.